It was a very distant era. Kaohsiung was the third largest port in the world, and the whole of Taiwan was ready to go. Boys still had to be soldiers, and... wait for soldiers. A group of Penghu teenagers who did not go to university. Bored waiting for the list of soldiers, fighting and making trouble all day, sneaking into the theater to watch movies, and finally deciding to go to Kaohsiung for a working adventure; also entered the growing life from the Garden of Eden.
A long time ago, there was a bulk sms service generation of "college students don't watch Chinese movies", and the movies of the "People from the Wind Cabinet" generation were like miracles. Why not watch national movies? Because it is unrealistic, fake, and fundamentally fantastic; we can't imagine seeing the real, our own life in movies; and an aesthetic that has never been seen in Taiwanese movies. Perhaps Hou Hsiao-hsien's early films were all due to his casual intuition, but he did educate an entire generation of moviegoers. "The Man from the Windbox" is said to be bad at the box office. It took me a while to see this movie, and I fell in love with it madly. When I participated in a drama competition in college, I had to project the stills of some boys playing tricks on the beach onto the stage, and I had to steal the dialogue from the film and read it on the stage, but it had nothing to do with it at all.
I remember that a famous person used to describe this film as "the unpredictable sadness and tragicness of youthful life". I couldn't help myself from these words. Years later, when I wrote Zheng Youjie's article "They Exploded the Day Before Graduation", I just put this The sentence is concave to be the title. (Memory can be deceiving, or maybe these words are just my own thoughts.) "The Man from the Wind Cabinet" is the memory of youth, the memory of being a man/military; Hou Hsiao-hsien's later works almost endorsed Taiwan's historical memory. At that time, Taiwan was undergoing a major transformation in its